A strike against spammers
Here is some good news on the anti-spam front: a group of Nigerian and Beninese (Beninian?) spammers nailed in Amsterdam. But, reading the article, I was surprised to learn of the hoodwinked Swiss professor, which damages my stereotype of the Swiss–educated ones, at least–being financially canny.
Think your look is unique?
Think again.
A common Anglo-Saxon name
This (third name on list) is not me. I do not write poems about my toes. Or maggots. Not that I’ve got anything against maggots.
Now the story can be told . . . in Pravda, apparently taking its journalistic lead from the supermarket tabloids, which, as we all know, are staffed Florida-loving expatriate British journalists fired from their UK jobs for excessive-even-by-Fleet-Street-standards drunkeness:
In the beginning of August 1987 five soldiers of Leningrad Military District went to the North of Karelia region on a special mission. They were required to guard the object of unknown origin. It was found on the territory of another military unit near the town of Vyborg. The item was 14 meters long, 4 meters wide, 2.5 meters high.
Although it is a bit off this blog’s stated purpose, I have published earlier (here and here) on the joy of transcontinental travel by Amtrak sleeping car.
Sometimes I think of what were the glory days of train travel, when the Pullman Company owned the sleeping cars (leasing them to railroads) and hired the attendants — “porters,” as they were called then — freed black slaves at first, in the latter part of the 19th century.
But the relationship between the porters and the company was far from simplistic. By 1925, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of blacks in the nation, and the company’s involvement in communities as a good corporate citizen, especially its contributions to black churches, had bought it considerable goodwill among influential black leaders, particularly the ministers in the big churches in large cities. Well-placed advertisements in black newspapers helped as well. Recipients of the company’s largess were loath to call for organized opposition to their benefactor.
They were paid less than white railway workers, of course, and they not only had to serve but to be subservient as well. Hence, in the 1920s, they struggled to unionize as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a “craft union” that would eventually, in the 1930s, become part of the American Federation of Labor.
For that story, you might look for a made-for-television (Showtime channel) movie, “10,000 Black Men Named George,” starring Andr? Braugher as organizer Philip Randolph and Mario Van Peebles as one of his associates. Charles S. Dutton’s character helps earn the film an “R” rating. Sure, it’s a TV movie and it’s a little two-dimensional and cleaned up, but how many such movies on labor history are there?
His name’s not George (unless it really is)
Although it is a bit off this blog’s stated purpose, I have published earlier (here and here) on the joy of transcontinental travel by Amtrak sleeping car.
Sometimes I think of what were the glory days of train travel, when the Pullman Company owned the sleeping cars (leasing them to railroads) and hired the attendants — “porters,” as they were called then — freed black slaves at first, in the latter part of the 19th century.
But the relationship between the porters and the company was far from simplistic. By 1925, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of blacks in the nation, and the company’s involvement in communities as a good corporate citizen, especially its contributions to black churches, had bought it considerable goodwill among influential black leaders, particularly the ministers in the big churches in large cities. Well-placed advertisements in black newspapers helped as well. Recipients of the company’s largess were loath to call for organized opposition to their benefactor.
They were paid less than white railway workers, of course, and they not only had to serve but to be subservient as well. Hence, in the 1920s, they struggled to unionize as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a “craft union” that would eventually, in the 1930s, become part of the American Federation of Labor.
For that story, you might look for a made-for-television (Showtime channel) movie, “10,000 Black Men Named George,” starring Andr? Braugher as organizer Philip Randolph and Mario Van Peebles as one of his associates. Charles S. Dutton’s character helps earn the film an “R” rating. Sure, it’s a TV movie and it’s a little two-dimensional and cleaned up, but how many such movies on labor history are there?
His name’s not George (unless it really is)
Although it is a bit off this blog’s stated purpose, I have published earlier (here and here) on the joy of transcontinental travel by Amtrak sleeping car.
Sometimes I think of what were the glory days of train travel, when the Pullman Company owned the sleeping cars (leasing them to railroads) and hired the attendants — “porters,” as they were called then — freed black slaves at first, in the latter part of the 19th century.
But the relationship between the porters and the company was far from simplistic. By 1925, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of blacks in the nation, and the company’s involvement in communities as a good corporate citizen, especially its contributions to black churches, had bought it considerable goodwill among influential black leaders, particularly the ministers in the big churches in large cities. Well-placed advertisements in black newspapers helped as well. Recipients of the company’s largess were loath to call for organized opposition to their benefactor.
They were paid less than white railway workers, of course, and they not only had to serve but to be subservient as well. Hence, in the 1920s, they struggled to unionize as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a “craft union” that would eventually, in the 1930s, become part of the American Federation of Labor.
For that story, you might look for a made-for-television (Showtime channel) movie, “10,000 Black Men Named George,” starring Andr? Braugher as organizer Philip Randolph and Mario Van Peebles as one of his associates. Charles S. Dutton’s character helps earn the film an “R” rating. Sure, it’s a TV movie and it’s a little two-dimensional and cleaned up, but how many such movies on labor history are there?
His name’s not George (unless it really is)
Although it is a bit off this blog’s stated purpose, I have published earlier (here and here) on the joy of transcontinental travel by Amtrak sleeping car.
Sometimes I think of what were the glory days of train travel, when the Pullman Company owned the sleeping cars (leasing them to railroads) and hired the attendants — “porters,” as they were called then — freed black slaves at first, in the latter part of the 19th century.
But the relationship between the porters and the company was far from simplistic. By 1925, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of blacks in the nation, and the company’s involvement in communities as a good corporate citizen, especially its contributions to black churches, had bought it considerable goodwill among influential black leaders, particularly the ministers in the big churches in large cities. Well-placed advertisements in black newspapers helped as well. Recipients of the company’s largess were loath to call for organized opposition to their benefactor.
They were paid less than white railway workers, of course, and they not only had to serve but to be subservient as well. Hence, in the 1920s, they struggled to unionize as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a “craft union” that would eventually, in the 1930s, become part of the American Federation of Labor.
For that story, you might look for a made-for-television (Showtime channel) movie, “10,000 Black Men Named George,” starring Andr? Braugher as organizer Philip Randolph and Mario Van Peebles as one of his associates. Charles S. Dutton’s character helps earn the film an “R” rating. Sure, it’s a TV movie and it’s a little two-dimensional and cleaned up, but how many such movies on labor history are there?
While I wait for some uploading issues to be sorted out, here are follow-ups to two recent posts.
First, I mentioned on January 1 the book Nightmare Alley as possibly inspiring or prefiguring Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan in the 1960s.
I have now read Nightmare Alley, and the short answer is, I don’t think so. It certainly is not the blueprint for the CoS that Stranger in a Strange Land was for the Church of All Worlds at about the same time. Nightmare Alley does involve a shrewd, glib carnival mind reader who becomes a fraudulent Spiritualist minister, and it is appropriately cynical about the human condition, however.
Second, Mary Beard’s The Invention of Jane Harrison, mentioned on January 14, disappointed me, perhaps because I was hoping for more of an intellectual biography that assessed Harrison’s study of ancient Greece and also positioned her–as Ronald Hutton briefly did in The Triumph of the Moon, as one of the foremothers of today’s Pagan revival.
Instead, the reader gets more of “who had a spat with whom in 1889.” Beard, who teaches Classics at Cambridge University (in Harrison’s footsteps, so to speak), offers some interesting light on how Classics as a field was presented and was evolving in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. She also spends much effort in a sort of meta-biography, writing about the problems of writing a biography of Harrison. And she dances around the topic of sex, saying several times that we cannot impose the term “lesbian” on the Victorians; but, on the other hand, was she or wasn’t she?
As a study of the rise of academic celebrity–Harrison as a sort of public intellectual–it is interesting, and Beard’s style is fluid and entertaining.
Apologies
Blogging has been interrupted while DrakNet, where I park this blog, changes servers again. “This is only a test.”